25 - Nicholas Christakis - A Blueprint for Universal Liberal Humanism

4:54 Universals that we express between ourselves 6:06 The social suite 10:06 Fiction, empathy & social learning 14:20 Qualities we share with other animals 16:24: Groups, in-group bias, co-operation (at 23:28 Helen interjects to talk about intersectionality) 31:37 Would aliens visiting us be friendly? 37:15 AI 40:01 Why isn’t Earth a dystopia? 43:09 The decline in poverty worldwide 44:55 Steven Pinker’s approach v. Nicholas’ approach 45:58 Are people really happier? What about meaning? 50:30 Social media, the digital world, bureaucracy 53:05 The main lessons of the book Blueprint You can find Nicholas’ book Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society here: https://www.amazon.com/Blueprint-Evolutionary-Origins-Good-Society/dp/0316230030 His book Connected: The Surprising Power of our Social Networks and how they Shape our Lives can be found here: http://www.connectedthebook.com/ Find out more about Nicholas’ work with the Yale University Human Nature Lab here: https://yins.yale.edu/our-labs/human-nature-lab. You can follow Nicholas on Twitter @NAChristakis. Other sources mentioned in the podcast: Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion: https://www.amazon.com/Righteous-Mind-Divided-Politics-Religion/dp/0307455777; Pietraszewski et al (2015) “Constituents of Political Cognition: Race, Party, Politics, and the Alliance Detection System,” Cognition 140, pp. 24–39: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010027715000578 Jonathan Gottschall (his work in general): http://jonathangottschall.com/ The article by John Staddon Helen critiqued: https://quillette.com/2019/04/11/is-secular-humanism-a-religion/